Defend the crown: Help Asheville remain Beer City USA

Asheville’s many craft breweries (more than a dozen, depending how you count) are some excellent reasons why we’ve been named Beer City USA for the past three years.

But the ones who really earned the accolade are the enthusiastic beer fans. Since 2010, Asheville’s beer community has voted in full force in beer writer Charlie Papazian‘s Beer City USA poll. As a result of their efforts, Asheville has trumped larger metros, including Denver and Portland, and taken the title.

In 2012, Asheville tied for the title with Grand Rapids, Mich., home of Founder’s Brewing and HopCat, among others. This year, Grand Rapids supporters don’t seem to want to share the title. In the poll’s heated comments section, one Grand Rapids supporter, posting as “Tessa,” writes:

In Asheville, it is a hopeless void where there is not much going for it. It is a city of PTSD drunks who work in the service industry drinking away failed dreams lost to a culture of mediocrity that looms over the former Cherokee holy land.

In another another post, “Tessa” continues:

All of Asheville’s “micro brews” leave one with impurity hangovers after one beer. Asheville is a mediocre, try too hard to impress, failure. Quantity of small breweries does not equal to quality.

Clearly, it’s time to show Grand Rapids that Asheville is the one-and-only Beer City, USA. After all, as Papazian writes on the National Beer Examiner’s website, the title isn’t about any objective standard — it’s about the community’s passion for beer. “Beer City USA poll highlights the spirit of support local, small town and big city Americans generate on behalf of their communities,” he says. “Bee rCity USA is not a measure of beer quality, number of breweries, volume of beer enjoyed nor any kind of ‘best-of-show’ measurement.”

There are 21 other contenders, including Portland, Ore., Fort Collins, Colo., Denver and Raleigh. The poll results will be private until Monday, May 13, at 2 p.m. (EST), so there’s no way of knowing how Asheville stacks up. However, the comments section reveals much heckling between Asheville and Grand Rapids supporters.